Vdare.com

The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/ Cheney/ Obama /neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the paper’s website for the past three days was the “Inside the Beltway” report, “Explosive News,” [By Jennifer Harper, February 22, 2010]about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members.

I was even more surprised that the news report treated the press conference seriously.

How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust? How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires? “A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7,” reports the Washington Times.

The paper reports that the architects and engineers have concluded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology provided “insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction” and are “calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials.”

The newspaper reports that Richard Gage, the spokesperson for the architects and engineers said: “Government officials will be notified that ‘Misprision of Treason,’ U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382) is a serious federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act. The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial.”

There is now an organization, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth. At the main press conference in San Francisco, Erik Lawyer, the head of that organization, announced the firefighters’ support for the architects and engineers’ demands. He reported that no forensic investigation was made of the fires that are alleged to have destroyed the three buildings and that this failure constitutes a crime.

Mandated procedures were not followed, and instead of being preserved and investigated, the crime scene was destroyed. He also reported that there are more than one hundred first responders who heard and experienced explosions and that there is radio, audio and video evidence of explosions.

Also at the press conference, physicist Steven Jones presented the evidence of nano-thermite in the residue of the WTC buildings found by an international panel of scientists led by University of Copenhagen nano-chemist Professor Niels Harrit. Nano-thermite is a high-tech explosive/pyrotechnic capable of instantly melting steel girders.

Before we yell “conspiracy theory,” we should be aware that the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists offer no theory. They provide evidence that challenges the official theory. This evidence is not going to go away.

If expressing doubts or reservations about the official story in the 9/11 Commission Report makes a person a conspiracy theory kook, then we have to include both co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission and the Commission’s legal counsel, all of whom have written books in which they clearly state that they were lied to by government officials when they conducted their investigation, or, rather, when they presided over the investigation conducted by executive director Philip Zelikow, a member of President George W. Bush’s transition team and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a co-author of Bush Secretary of State Condi “Mushroom Cloud” Rice.

There will always be Americans who will believe whatever the government tells them no matter how many times they know the government has lied to them. Despite expensive wars that threaten Social Security and Medicare, wars based on non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, non-existent Saddam Hussein connections to al Qaida, non-existent Afghan participation in the 9/11 attacks, and the non-existent Iranian nukes that are being hyped as the reason for the next American war of aggression in the Middle East, more than half of the U.S. population still believes the fantastic story that the government has told them about 9/11, a Muslim conspiracy that outwitted the entire Western world.

Moreover, it doesn’t matter to these Americans how often the government changes its story. For example, Americans first heard of Osama bin Laden because the Bush regime pinned the 9/11 attacks on him. Over the years video after video was served up to the gullible American public of bin Laden’s pronouncements. Experts dismissed the videos as fakes, but Americans remained their gullible selves. Then suddenly last year a new 9/11 “mastermind” emerged to take bin Laden’s place, the captive Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the detainee waterboarded 183 times until he confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attack.

In the Middle Ages confessions extracted by torture constituted evidence, but self-incrimination has been a no-no in the U.S. legal system since our founding. But with the Bush regime and the Republican federal judges, whom we were assured would defend the U.S. Constitution, the self-incrimination of Sheik Mohammed stands today as the only evidence the U.S. government has that Muslim terrorists pulled off 9/11.

If a person considers the feats attributed to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, they are simply unbelievable. Sheik Mohammed is a more brilliant, capable superhero than V in the fantasy movie, “V for Vendetta.” Sheik Mohammed outwitted all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies along with those of all U.S. allies or puppets, including Israel’s Mossad. No intelligence service on earth or all of them combined was a match for Sheik Mohammed.

Sheik Mohammed outwitted the U.S. National Security Council, Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, the State Department, NORAD, the U.S. Air Force, and Air Traffic Control.

He caused Airport Security to fail four times in one morning. He caused the state-of-the-art air defenses of the Pentagon to fail, allowing a hijacked airliner, which was off course all morning while the U.S. Air Force, for the first time in history, was unable to get aloft interceptor aircraft, to crash into the Pentagon.

Sheik Mohammed was able to perform these feats with unqualified pilots.

Sheik Mohammed, even as a waterboarded detainee, has managed to prevent the FBI from releasing the many confiscated videos that would show, according to the official story, the hijacked airliner hitting the Pentagon.

How naive do you have to be to believe that any human, or for that matter Hollywood fantasy character, is this powerful and capable?

If Sheik Mohammed has these superhuman capabilities, how did the incompetent Americans catch him? This guy is a patsy tortured into confession in order to keep the American naifs believing the government’s conspiracy theory.

What is going on here is that the U.S. government has to bring the 9/11 mystery to an end. The government must put on trial and convict a culprit so that it can close the case before it explodes. Anyone waterboarded 183 times would confess to anything.

The U.S. government has responded to the evidence being arrayed against its outlandish 9/11 conspiracy theory by redefining the war on terror from external to internal enemies. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on February 21 that American extremists are now as big a concern as international terrorists. Extremists, of course, are people who get in the way of the government’s agenda, such as the 1,000 Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The group used to be 100, now it is 1,000. What if it becomes 10,000?

Cass Sunstein, an Obama regime official, has a solution for the 9/11 skeptics: Infiltrate them and provoke them into statements and actions that can be used to discredit or to arrest them. But get rid of them at all cost.

Why employ such extreme measures against alleged kooks if they only provide entertainment and laughs? Is the government worried that they are on to something?

Instead, why doesn’t the U.S. government simply confront the evidence that is presented and answer it?

If the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists are merely kooks, it would be a simple matter to acknowledge their evidence and refute it. Why is it necessary to infiltrate them with police agents and to set them up?

Many Americans would reply that “their” government would never even dream of killing Americans by hijacking airliners and destroying buildings in order to advance a government agenda. But on February 3, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that the U.S. government can assassinate its own citizens when they are overseas. No arrest, trial, or conviction of a capital crime is necessary. Just straight out murder.

Obviously, if the U.S. government can murder its citizens abroad it can murder them at home, and has done so. For example, 100 Branch Davidians were murdered in Waco, Texas, by the Clinton administration for no legitimate reason. The government just decided to use its power knowing that it could get away with it, which it did.

Americans who think “their” government is some kind of morally pure operation would do well to familiarize themselves with Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods was a plot drawn up by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff for the CIA to commit acts of terrorism in American cities and fabricate evidence blaming Castro so that the U.S. could gain domestic and international support for regime change in Cuba. The secret plan was nixed by President John F. Kennedy and was declassified by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. It is available online in the National Security Archive. There are numerous online accounts available, including Wikipedia. James Bamford’s book, Body of Secrets, also summarizes the plot:

“Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman [Gen. Lemnitzer] and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.”

Prior to 9/11 the American neoconservatives were explicit that the wars of aggression that they intended to launch in the Middle East required “a new Pearl Harbor.”

For their own good and that of the wider world, Americans need to pay attention to the growing body of experts who are telling them that the government’s account of 9/11 fails their investigation. 9/11 launched the neoconservative plan for U.S. world hegemony. As I write the U.S. government is purchasing the agreement of foreign governments that border Russia to accept U.S. missile interceptor bases. The U.S. intends to ring Russia with U.S. missile bases from Poland through central Europe and Kosovo to Georgia, Azerbaijan and central Asia. [See Impending Explosion: U.S. Intensifies Threats To Russia And Iran, by Rick Rozoff, Global Research, February 19, 2010] U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke declared on February 20 that al Qaida is moving into former central Asian constituent parts of the Soviet Union, such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Holbrooke is soliciting U.S. bases in these former Soviet republics under the guise of the ever-expanding “war on terror.”

The U.S. has already encircled Iran with military bases. The U.S. government intends to neutralize China by seizing control over the Middle East and cutting China off from oil.

This plan assumes that Russia and China, nuclear armed states, will be intimidated by U.S. anti-missile defenses and acquiesce to U.S. hegemony and that China will lack oil for its industries and military.

The U.S. government is delusional. Russian military and political leaders have responded to the obvious threat by declaring NATO a direct threat to the security of Russia and by announcing a change in Russian war doctrine to the pre-emptive launch of nuclear weapons. The Chinese are too confident to be bullied by a washed up American “superpower.”

The morons in Washington are pushing the envelope of nuclear war. The insane drive for American hegemony threatens life on earth. The American people, by accepting the lies and deceptions of “their” government, are facilitating this outcome.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

Newstatesman.com

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said that “the world” supported the invasion in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks. In truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden”. In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over Bin Laden for trial, Pakistan’s military regime reported, and they were ignored.

“Hearts and minds”

Even Obama’s mystification of the 9/11 attacks as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the twin towers were attacked, the former Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik was told by the Bush administration that a US military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as “stable” enough to ensure US control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama’s most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the west. His own national security adviser, James Jones, said in October that there were “fewer than 100″ al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but “a tribal localised insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of “world peace”.

Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McChrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan is a model for those “disorderly regions” of the world still beyond Oceania’s reach. This is known as Coin (counter- insurgency), and draws together the military, aid organisations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, it aims to incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbeks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They built walls between communities which had once intermarried, ethnically cleansing the Sunnis and driving millions out of the country. Embedded media reported this as “peace”; American academics bought by Washington and “security experts” briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into “target areas” controlled by warlords, bankrolled by the CIA and the opium trade. That these warlords are barbaric is irrelevant. “We can live with that,” a Clinton-era diplomat once said of the return of oppressive sharia law in a “stable”, Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favoured western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the “humanitarian crisis” and so “secure” the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia, where ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once-peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam, where the CIA’s “Strategic Hamlet Program” was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Vietcong – the Americans’ catch-all term for the resistance, similar to “Taliban”.

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and the Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance – these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people. And yet, for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

Imperial cemeteries

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and his general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

“It was curious,” wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same – everywhere, all over the world . . . people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same – people who . . . were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”

© New Statesman 1913 – 2009

When the U.S. and its principal ally Great Britain invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2001 and 2003 respectively, both President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair believed they were fulfilling “God’s Will.”

This has been rumored for years after fundamentalist Bush was quoted six years ago as saying that he launched the invasions because he was “on a mission from God.” But new evidence establishes both former leaders were convinced that the Christian deity supported their attacks on the two Islamic countries.

Former French Premier Jacques Chirac, in a book published in March, revealed that Bush said he was fulfilling Biblical prophesy in starting each of his unjust, illegal wars. In late May, John Burton, one of Blair’s closest political associates for a quarter-century and often described as his mentor, told the press that the British leader’s support of the wars was “all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil.”

An account of Bush’s religious motivations appeared May 24 in CounterPunch under the byline of Clive Hamilton, a visiting professor at Yale.

“In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac,” Hamilton wrote. “Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated. In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped.

“The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy: ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.’”

“Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac: ‘This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.’”

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and ‘wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.’”

Blair’s support for wars of aggression was likewise justified by religious beliefs, which is hardly a new phenomenon in either the ancient or modern world. Has there ever been a war when God wasn’t on America’s, or Great Britain’s side?

The London Daily Telegraph of May 23 published an interview with Blair’s friend Burton who revealed that the ex-Prime Minister was frustrated because British politics – as opposed to the politics of godly America – frowned upon expressions of religious zeal by the country’s top leaders. Now that he’s out of office, Blair has established the “Tony Blair Faith Foundation” and has been interviewed numerous times about his religious views.

According to the Telegraph, “The former Prime Minister’s faith is claimed to have influenced all his key policy decisions and to have given him an unshakeable conviction that he was right.” Burton said “It’s very simple to explain the idea of Blair the Warrior. It was part of Tony living out his faith. While he was at Number 10, Tony was virtually gagged on the whole question of religion. But Tony’s Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil, making lives better.”

The newspaper continued: Burton’s “comments will add to the suspicions of Mr. Blair’s critics, who fear he saw the Iraq war in a similar light to Bush, who used religious rhetoric in talking about the conflict, as well as the war in Afghanistan, describing them as ‘a crusade.’”

The BBC reported Bush’s “mission from God” statement following the U.S. president’s June 2003 meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath. They disclosed that “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did.”

A year later, the Commander in Chief of the most deadly war machine in history confessed that, in effect, his is the voice of a supernatural being: “I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.”

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a skillful manipulator of Bush’s delusional religious beliefs. It was revealed in May by GQ magazine that Rumsfeld adorned the covers of his top secret war intelligence reports to the president with biblical quotations along with photos of American
soldiers and battle equipment. One such report, a few days after the invasion, showed a U.S. tank in the desert and a paragraph from Ephesians 6:13, declaring: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” (3)

On March 22, 2003, Rumsfeld announced in a worldwide broadcast that his threatened “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad had just commenced. The dark sky over the Iraqi capital was illuminated throughout the long night by Washington’s bombs bursting in air like Fourth of July firecrackers, accompanied by the “ohs” and “ahs” of a huge American television audience. The screaming and pain were off camera. Over the course of six years more than a million Iraqis have been slain so far in carrying out Bush’s mission from God to “liberate” the country and confiscate all its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

To Bush, Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe” terror bombing was the equivalent of a vengeful God’s threat against Gog and Magog in Ezekiel 38:22: “And with pestilence and with blood I shall enter into judgment with him; and I shall rain on him, and on his troops, and on the many peoples who are with him, a torrential rain, with hailstones, fire, and brimstone.”

How many poor, innocent peasant families will be killed in destitute Afghanistan now that the successor to a Christian religious fanatic has decided to hurl his own “hailstones, fire, and brimstone” against the Islamic religious fanaticism of the Taliban?

But of course “you don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.” Onward Christian soldiers, Onward as to war!

Reprinted from DissidentVoice.

This latest report by the Senate Armed Services Committee exposes the “few bad apples” argument as a complete farce.¹ While the Bush Administration was publicly saying the horrors of Abu Ghraib were just aberrations, this report clearly shows that in fact, torture was sanctioned and even encouraged in military detention centers.

Thanks to citizen response over the past few weeks, the momentum for investigations is snowballing. Last Friday President Obama said this was a time for “reflection, not retribution”; less than a week later, national newspapers are reporting the President is now open to an investigation.²

But what kind of investigation? There’s a growing risk that we may get an investigation that lacks independence, legal authority, and the adequate funding necessary to tell the full truth about the illegal, U.S. torture program.

What we need is a non-partisan independent commission, free from political influences, that has subpoena power and enough money to track down every lead.³

Tell President Obama and Congress that any investigation must be independent, backed by the full force of law, and have enough funding to uncover the full truth behind the U.S. torture program.

Even with the release of this classified report, we still only know a portion of the truth. And it’s only by exposing the full truth of what was done in our names, that we can once and for all move forward and restore our nation’s credibility.

Let’s make sure whatever investigation moves forward, it’s backed by the authority and support it needs to be effective.

Please send your letter now to President Obama and Congress urging for an independent investigation backed by the full force of law and adequate funding.

In just one week, we’ve gone from seeing an investigation as a long shot, to talking about what kind of investigation we need. Your actions, phone calls, and visits before Congress are making an impact. We’re getting closer to seeing our government actually do the right thing.

Thanks for standing with us.

Njambi Good
Director, Counter Terror with Justice Campaign

1 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22report.html?hp
2 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042102187.html
3 http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=ENGAMR511512008

Sixty-nine Million of us voted for President Obama because he promised hope and change from the disasters of the Bush Administration. Countless millions of human beings around the planet joined us in our relief and our elation when he was elected. An unthinking uncritical “Obamamania” among most of his supporters continues to prevail so far. This is dangerous for them, for President Obama and for all of us. Without critical analysis and pressure from his millions of supporters, Obama will stumble into disaster.

We have carefully watched the new President’s first 100 days and we are appalled. We find that Obama has continued Bush policies affecting the abuses of Wall Street banks, and allowing Wall Street wrongdoers to manage our economy and the “recovery.”

Forget the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, the prosecution of Eliot Spitzer for his sexual indiscretion, and Bernard Madoff’s little Ponzi-scheme. What about prosecuting those bankers who profited from the most massive fraudulent swindle in human history?

Reputable commentators such as Michael Whitney, John Paul Roberts, Professor Michael Hudson, and now Professor William K. Black have spelled out the details. The CNBC TV Documentary House of Cards explained in detail with surprisingly candid on camera, guilt free admissions by the wrong-doers how this swindle worked from the borrowers and mortgage salesmen in Los Angeles to the top CEOs of Wall Street and to the Fed. These sources of our information have been relatively diplomatic in tone. It is time to name names and cite the fraudulent acts of those responsible, and the specific violations of law.

As we evaluate all of this, keep in mind what William K. Black said on Bill Moyer’s April 3 program about making risky loans where the ability of the borrower to repay a loan is not vetted: “We know that will produce enormous fraud under economic theory, criminology theory, and two thousand years of life experience.” Both Democrats and Republicans, hand in hand with Wall Street Bankers, by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, and by enacting The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 specifically to preclude regulation, caused the current extraordinary depression and crisis by ignoring and acting contrary to this accumulated human wisdom. Think of this when you evaluate whether their acts were knowing and intentional and whether they are guilty or innocent.

THE INTENTIONAL FRAUD OF THE WALL STREET BANKERS, RATING COMPANIES, AND THEIR CONGRESSIONAL ENABLERS

The legal elements or requirements of the crime or wrong of fraud known to every first year law student are:

   1. An intentional misrepresentation of facts or a false promise
   2. Knowledge of falsity
   3. Intent to deceive
   4. Justifiable and actual reliance on the truth of what was represented or promised
   5. Resulting Damage

President Obama is a brilliant lawyer, top of his class at Harvard Law, and a ten year professor of Constitutional Law. His roots are in Chicago politics. President Obama clearly knows the elements of fraud.

We know the factual details of the wrongdoing from CNBC’s video House of Cards where those involved in the fraud at each level made surprisingly candid admissions of what they had done. At each level, the CEOs involved felt no guilt or responsibility. They would not have changed their conduct in retrospect Each said he had to do what he did to stay in business and to compete with others who were doing the same thing. This was the “justification” at every level from LA mortgage salesperson, to the bankers, the creators of layers of derivatives and credit default swaps to the raters who gave the derivatives that they knew or should have known were not worth their stated values: AAA ratings. All of this was happening in the context of congressionally granted exemptions from regulation, and NY Fed President Timothy Geithner’s failure to supervise and to regulate.

The Wall Street bankers deliberately made and palmed off to others loans that they knew were really bad. They made them because they were so profitable. Among themselves, they called them “liar’s loans” because they did not care if borrowers were unqualified and they encouraged them to lie about their incomes. They created the layers of derivatives based on these pools of liar loans, knowing that they were extremely risky. They pressured the rating companies to give them AAA ratings, and the rating companies complied “because the competition was doing it” when they knew or should have known that the “securities” were really not of AAA quality.

Foreign investors, domestic pension fund managers, and foreign governments and banks justifiably relied on the Wall Street banker’s sales pitch and the AAA ratings. The AAA rating satisfies the obligation of “due diligence” in checking the risk of an investment. These innocent but sophisticated investors had a right to assume that NY Fed President Timothy Geithner was doing his duty of supervising and regulating.

All of these investors were damaged when the house of cards collapsed. The investors have been damaged. We the citizens and voters and generations of our offspring have suffered almost incalculable damage…damage totaling many trillions of dollars that will plague us for generations.

This is the massive Wall Street fraud that President Obama inherited, and is now covering up, and possibly attempting to restart.

PRESIDENT OBAMA IS NOT FAITHFULLY EXECUTING THE LAW REGARDING UNDERCAPITALIZED BANKS

President Obama now has the sworn Presidential duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Thus he must “faithfully” prosecute financial wrongdoing, avoid conflicts of interest, and specifically, take certain prompt action against wrongdoing Wall Street banks as mandated by the Prompt Corrective Action Law that was enacted just following the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. This law is found in Title 12 United States Code beginning at Section 1831.¹ There is no exception in the law for “banks that are too big to fail,” and no exception for criminal enterprises even if they are large.

Instead of bailing out wrongdoing banks with Trillions of dollars of our money, President Obama is required by federal law to appoint a receiver for the bank within 90 days after it becomes critically undercapitalized. He must prosecute those bankers who were paid salaries or bonuses while their banks were undercapitalized. There is no question that they are undercapitalized because they require Trillions just to make them function, without complying with legal standards. If “they are too large to fail,” they have seized way too much private “mafia-like” power over all of us. President Obama can and must follow the law.

OBAMA’S CHOSEN FINANCIAL AND ECONOMIC ADVISORS KNOWINGLY DEREGULATED SO AS TO ENABLE THE FRAUD, AND THEN PARTICIPATED IN THE FRAUD AND PROFITED FROM IT

Obama’ Chief Economic Advisor, Larry Summers one of Clinton’s Secretaries of the Treasury, and Robert Rubin along with Republican Senator Phil Gramm lead the lobbying effort to repeal the Glass Steagall Act thereby enabling Wall Street Banks to invest in derivatives, hedge funds, and credit default swaps, and permitting Wall Street insurance companies to engage in banking.

Then the same three men, Summers, Rubin, and Gramm together with Alan Greenspan lead the effort to persuade Congress to pass a law in 2000 without debate in either the House or the Senate prohibiting the regulation of these newly enabled Wall Street financial giants. It is known as The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, and is found in Title 7 USC Section 2. The exemptions from regulation are found in Sections 2 (g) and 2(h).² President Clinton signed the new law on December 21, 2000.

Obama’s Chief Economic Advisor Larry Summers and his Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner both pushed for the enactment of this law which enabled the ensuing fraud involving mortgages and the layers of derivatives that were known to be risky and worthless.

Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner, President of the New York division of the Fed where all of the major Wall Street banks are located had the following duties according to its own mission statement:

It is responsible for

   formulating and executing monetary policy,
   supervising and regulating depository institutions,
   providing an elastic currency,
   assisting the federal government’s financing operations, and
   serving as the banker for the U.S. government.

In addition to paying his own taxes, Timothy Geithner had a public responsibility and duty to all of us. Timothy Geithner, the man chiefly responsible for avoiding what has happened, instead facilitated the fraud. He did not supervise and he did not regulate.

PRESIDENT OBAMA IS KNOWINGLY AND INTENTIONALLY REWARDING CRIMINALS AND IS COVERING UP WALL STREET BANK CRIMES AND FRAUD

It is a felony for any person including the President of the United States to cover up a crime. 18 USC Section 4 states:

Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

Such a cover up is also criminal fraud as defined in 47USC 1001.³

Such a cover up when done by a President, Vice President or a Secretary of Treasury is also a “high crime and misdemeanor” warranting impeachment under Article II, Section 4 of our Constitution:

“The president, vice president and all other civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of…high crimes and misdemeanors.”

President Obama has also taken the Presidential Oath that he will faithfully execute this cover up avoidance law as well, and not to violate it himself.

80% of the American people, according to a recent poll believe that Wall Street is crooked and is responsible for our current Depression.

Obama, in a recent speech to Wall Street CEOs telling them to “cool it” about justifying their contract rights to bonuses, said

“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

So what is he saying to the 80% of us potentially holding pitchforks who voted for him?

In effect, he is saying in his vague, charming, persuasive and hypnotic way: “I know of no crimes. I want to look to the future I will not prosecute the bankers. I will hire them as advisors. We have nothing to learn from their mistakes. We together will try to restore lending, and restart the economy as it was.”

What are President Obama’s own lawyers, Dawn Johnson Chief of the Office of Legal Counsel and Attorney General Eric Holder advising him? Are they, like John Yoo and Michael Mukasey who advised Bush that he could torture, advising Obama that he has the power to ignore the law created exactly for the purpose of dealing with failing banks because of an economic emergency? What is brilliant lawyer Obama advising himself? Where is there indication of Obama’s own integrity and inner moral compass?

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES FOR US IF OBAMA’S MUTI-TRILLION BAIL OUT OF WALL STREET “SUCCEEDS?”

The most immediate, pressing danger is that it will not work at all. Obama may not discover this until it is too late to try another solution. The reason is Obama seeks mainly to restore the lending ability of the Wall Street banks. That will work only if we are willing to fund our purchases by more borrowing. We are not. We will not borrow. We are too frightened. The great danger is of a total breakdown of civilized democratic society.

Even if it “works,” Obama’s plan will never succeed for us. The reasons are:

• Obama and his advisors see capitalism as a stable system that only got a little off track due to unfortunate lack of regulation. It is in fact in deep trouble even aside from the banking problem due to an overproduction of goods and services that can be produced at a profit. This is the underlying “systemic defect.” Failing to recognize this defect, Obama does nothing to solve it.
• Obama aims mainly toward providing more credit, restoring the Wall Street banks’ ability to lend money.
• Obama fails to deal adequately with restoring the purchasing power of consumers from our earned labor.
• The inevitable result for us will be a vast inflation of our dollars, so that each dollar buys less and less. We will be like frogs placed in slowly heating water. We will notice nothing at first. The “water” will heat slowly until it kills us. It may ultimately “succeed” for the wealthiest 1% in that they will own all of the land, gold, platinum, silver, and commodities and live in guarded gated castles. Those of us who survive will do so as feudal serfs who are permitted to share-crop their land. The result for Obama is that he will lose his bid for re-election in 2012 due to the massive despair and disillusionment of voters.

WHAT COULD OBAMA DO THAT WOULD WORK?

Although his window of opportunity is very short, if Obama changed course promptly before he has put us many trillions further in debt, there are sound, historically tested things he could do. They are bold. They involve a profound change in his analysis of our problem. He could:

• Cause our government to be the sole creator of our money supply, our silver coins, our dollar bills, and our “check book” money. Lincoln did this in 1860 to finance the Civil War. The state of Pennsylvania did this successfully for 50 years prior to 1789.
• Instead of borrowing from private banks and other governments, our government could create and issue money to meet government, business and individual needs, including rebuilding our infrastructure, education through college, and universal health coverage, and to pay our government’s obligations on existing bonds as they fell due.
• Prohibit “fractionalized reserve banking,” the practice of private bankers lending from 10 to 90 times the asset-reserves they hold. Allow banks only to loan on a 1 to 1 basis, from the dollars they have on deposit.
• Impose a top limit on interest that could be charged say 8%.
• Allow the Wall Street banks to go into bankruptcy, but retain enough of the needed staff employees to implement the new way of supplying money where needed.
• Repeal the Federal Reserve Act and install the needed functions of the Fed as a division of the Treasury Department.
• Enable local banks and businesses to continue to function as they now do.

1. 12 USC Section 1831 o. Prompt corrective action

(d) Provisions applicable to all institutions
(2) Management fees restricted
An insured depository institution SHALL pay no management fee to any person having control of that institution if, after making the payment, the institution would be undercapitalized.

(3) Conservatorship, receivership, or other action required
(A) In general
The appropriate Federal banking agency SHALL, not later than 90 days after an insured depository institution becomes critically undercapitalized-
(i) appoint a receiver (or, with the concurrence of the Corporation, a conservator) for the institution (Emphasis Added)

2. 7USC 2(g) provides the “Exon” exception for swaps:

(g) Excluded swap transactions
No provision of this chapter…shall apply to or govern any agreement, contract, or transaction in a commodity other than an agricultural commodity if the agreement, contract, or transaction is-
(1) entered into only between persons that are eligible contract participants at the time they enter into the agreement, contract, or transaction;
(2) subject to individual negotiation by the parties; and
(3) not executed or traded on a trading facility.

7USC 2 (h) (3) provides the exemption from regulation for derivatives so long as they are traded on an electronic trading facility (as they all were and are!)

(3)…, nothing in this chapter shall apply to an agreement, contract, or transaction in an exempt commodity which is-
(A) entered into on a principal-to-principal basis solely between persons that are eligible commercial entities at the time the persons enter into the agreement, contract, or transaction; and
(B) executed or traded on an electronic trading facility.

3. 47 USC Sec 1001 states in part: “(a) …whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully -

(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact… shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

Doug Page is a retired lawyer for unions, a former Democratic politician, and a life long observer of government, unions and business. He can be reached at: dougpage2@earthlink.net. Read other articles by Doug, or visit Doug’s website.

Reposted from DissidentVoice.org

Being Serious About Torture . . . Or Not

In Cambodia they’re once again endeavoring to hold trials to bring some former senior Khmer Rouge officials to justice for their 1975-79 war crimes and crimes against humanity. The current defendant in a United Nations-organized trial, Kaing Guek Eav, who was the head of a Khmer Rouge torture center, has confessed to atrocities, but insists he was acting under orders.¹ As we all know, this is the defense that the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected for the Nazi defendants. Everyone knows that, right? No one places any weight on such a defense any longer, right? We make jokes about Nazis declaring: “I was only following orders!” (“Ich habe nur den Befehlen gehorcht!”) Except that both the Bush and Obama administrations have spoken in favor of it. Here’s the new head of the CIA, Leon Panetta: “What I have expressed as a concern, as has the president, is that those who operated under the rules that were provided by the Attorney General in the interpretation of the law [concerning torture] and followed those rules ought not to be penalized. And … I would not support, obviously, an investigation or a prosecution of those individuals. I think they did their job.”² Operating under the rules … doing their job … are of course the same as following orders.

The UN Convention Against Torture (first adopted in 1984), which has been ratified by the United States, says quite clearly, “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.” The Torture Convention enacts a prohibition against torture that is a cornerstone of international law and a principle on a par with the prohibition against slavery and genocide.

Of course, those giving the orders are no less guilty. On the very day of Obama’s inauguration, the United Nation’s special torture rapporteur invoked the Convention in calling on the United States to pursue former president George W. Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for torture and bad treatment of Guantanamo prisoners.³

On several occasions, President Obama has indicated his reluctance to pursue war crimes charges against Bush officials, by expressing a view such as: “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” This is the same excuse Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has given for not punishing Khmer Rouge leaders. In December 1998 he asserted: “We should dig a hole and bury the past and look ahead to the 21st century with a clean slate.”⁴ Hun Sen has been in power all the years since then, and no Khmer Rouge leader has been convicted for their role in the historic mass murder.

And by not investigating Bush officials, Obama is indeed saying that they’re above the law. Like the Khmer Rouge officials have been. Michael Ratner, a professor at Columbia Law School and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said prosecuting Bush officials is necessary to set future anti-torture policy. “The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it. I don’t see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable.”⁵

One reason for the non-prosecution may be that serious trials of the many Bush officials who contributed to the torture policies might reveal the various forms of Democratic Party non-opposition and collaboration.

It should also be noted that the United States supported Pol Pot (who died in April 1998) and the Khmer Rouge for several years after they were ousted from power by the Vietnamese in 1979. This support began under Jimmy Carter and his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and continued under Ronald Reagan.⁶ A lingering bitterness by American cold warriors toward Vietnam, the small nation which monumental US power had not been able to defeat, and its perceived closeness to the Soviet Union, appears to be the only explanation for this policy. Humiliation runs deep when you’re a superpower.

Neither should it be forgotten in this complex cautionary tale that the Khmer Rouge in all likelihood would never have come to power, nor even made a serious attempt to do so, if not for the massive American “carpet bombing” of Cambodia in 1969-70 and the US-supported overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in 1970 and his replacement by a man closely tied to the United States.⁷ Thank you Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Well done, lads.

By the way, if you’re not already turned off by many of Obama’s appointments, listen to how James Jones opened his talk at the Munich Conference on Security Policy on February 8: “Thank you for that wonderful tribute to Henry Kissinger yesterday. Congratulations. As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger.”⁸

Lastly, Spain’s High Court recently announced it would launch a war crimes investigation into an Israeli ex-defense minister and six other top security officials for their role in a 2002 attack that killed a Hamas commander and 14 civilians in Gaza.⁹ Spain has for some time been the world’s leading practitioner of “universal jurisdiction” for human-rights violations, such as their indictment of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet a decade ago. The Israeli case involved the dropping of a bomb on the home of the Hamas leader; most of those killed were children. The United States does this very same thing every other day in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Given the refusal of American presidents to invoke even their “national jurisdiction” over American officials-cum-war criminals, we can only hope that someone reminds the Spanish authorities of a few names, names like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Feith, Perle, Yoo, and a few others with a piece missing, a piece that’s shaped like a conscience. There isn’t even a need to rely on international law alone, for there’s an American law against war crimes, passed by a Republican-dominated Congress in 1996.¹⁰

The noted Israeli columnist, Uri Avnery, writing about the Israeli case, tried to capture the spirit of Israeli society that produces such war criminals and war crimes. He observed: “This system indoctrinates its pupils with a violent tribal cult, totally ethnocentric, which sees in the whole of world history nothing but an endless story of Jewish victimhood. This is a religion of a Chosen People, indifferent to others, a religion without compassion for anyone who is not Jewish, which glorifies the God-decreed genocide described in the Biblical book of Joshua.”¹¹

It would take very little substitution to apply this statement to the United States – like “American” for “Jewish” and “American exceptionalism” for “a Chosen People”.

Hell Hath No Fury Like an Imperialist Scorned

Hugo Chávez’s greatest sin is that he has shown disrespect for the American Empire. Or as they would say in America’s inner cities – He’s dissed the Man. Such behavior of course cannot go unpunished lest it give other national leaders the wrong idea. Over the years, the United States has gotten along just fine with brutal dictators, mass murderers, torturers, and leaders who did nothing to relieve the poverty of their population – Augusto Pinochet, Pol Pot, the Greek Junta, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, Duvalier, Mobutu, the Brazil Junta, Somoza, Saddam Hussein, South African apartheid leaders, Portuguese fascists, etc., etc., terrible guys all, all seriously supported by Washington at one time or another; for none made it a regular habit, if ever, to diss the Man.

The latest evidence, we are told, that Hugo Chávez is a dictator and a threat to life as we know it is that he pushed for and got a constitutional amendment to remove term limits from the presidency. The American media and the opposition in Venezuela often make it sound as if Chávez is going to be guaranteed office for life, whereas he of course will have to be elected each time. Neither are we reminded that it’s not unusual for a nation to not have a term limit for its highest office. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, if not all of Europe and much of the rest of the world, do not have such a limit. The United States did not have a term limit on the office of the president during the nation’s first 162 years, until the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951. Were all American presidents prior to that time dictators?

In 2005, when Colombian President Alvaro Uribe succeeded in getting term limits lifted, the US mainstream media took scant notice. President Bush subsequently honored Uribe with the American Presidential Medal of Freedom. But in the period leading up to the February 15 referendum in Venezuela, the American media were competing with each other over who could paint Chávez and the Venezuelan constitutional process in the most critical and ominous terms. Typical was an op-ed in the Washington Post the day before the vote, which was headlined: “Closing in on Hugo Chávez”. Its opening sentence read: “The beginning of the end is setting in for Hugo Chávez.”¹²

For several years now, the campaign to malign Chávez has at times included issues of Israel and anti-Semitism. An isolated vandalism of a Caracas synagogue on January 30th of this year fed into this campaign. Synagogues are of course vandalized occasionally in the United States and many European countries, but no one ascribes this to a government policy driven by anti-semitism. With Chávez they do. In the American media, the lead up to the Venezuelan vote was never far removed from the alleged “Jewish” issue.

“Despite the government’s efforts to put the [synagogue] controversy to rest,” the New York Times wrote a few days before the referendum vote, “a sense of dread still lingers among Venezuela’s 12,000 to 14,000 Jews.”¹³

A day earlier, a Washington Post editorial was entitled: “Mr. Chávez vs. the Jews – With George W. Bush gone, Venezuela’s strongman has found new enemies.”¹⁴ Shortly before, a Post headline had informed us: “Jews in S. America Increasingly Uneasy – Government and Media Seen Fostering Anti-Semitism in Venezuela, Elsewhere.”¹⁵

So commonplace has the Chávez-Jewish association become that a leading US progressive organization, Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) in Washington, DC, recently distributed an article that reads more like the handiwork of a conservative group than a progressive one. I was prompted to write to them as follows:

Dear People,

I’m very sorry to say that I found your Venezuelan commentary by Larry Birns and David Rosenblum Felson to be remarkably lacking. The authors seem unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between being against Israeli policies from anti-semitism. It’s kind of late in the day for them to not have comprehended the difference. They are forced to fall back on a State Department statement to make their case. Is that not enough said?

They condemn Chávez likening Israel’s occupation of Gaza to the Holocaust. But what if it’s an apt comparison? They don’t delve into this question at all.

They also condemn the use of the word “Zionism”, saying that “in 9 times out of 10 involving the use of this word in fact smacks of anti-Semitism.” Really? Can they give a precise explanation of how one distinguishes between an anti-Semitic use of the word and a non-anti-semitic use of it? That would be interesting.

The authors write that Venezuela’s “anti-Israeli initiative … revealingly transcends the intensity of almost every Arabic nation or normal adversary of Israel.” Really. Since when are the totally gutless, dictator Arab nations the standard bearer for progressives? The ideal we should emulate. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan are almost never seriously and harshly critical of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Therefore, Venezuela shouldn’t be?

The authors state: “In a Christmas Eve address to the nation, Chávez charged that, ‘Some minorities, descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ … took all the world’s wealth for themselves’. Here, Chávez was not talking so much about Robin Hood, but rather unquestionably dipping into the lore of anti-Semitism.” Well, here’s the full quote: “The world has enough for all, but it turns out that some minorities, descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ, descendants of the same ones who threw Bolivar out of here and also crucified him in their own way at Santa Marta there in Colombia …” Hmm, were the Jews so active in South America?

The ellipsis after the word “Christ” indicates that the authors consciously and purposely omitted the words that would have given the lie to their premise. Truly astonishing.

After Chávez won the term-limits referendum with about 55% of the vote, a State Department spokesperson stated: “For the most part this was a process that was fully consistent with democratic process.” Various individuals and websites on the left have responded to this as an encouraging sign that the Obama administration is embarking on a new Venezuelan policy. At the risk of sounding like a knee-reflex cynic, I think this attitude is at best premature, at worst rather naive. It’s easy for a State Department a level-or-so above the Bushies, i.e., semi-civilized, to make such a statement. A little more difficult would be accepting as normal and unthreatening Venezuela having good relations with countries like Cuba, Iran and Russia and not blocking Venezuela from the UN Security Council. Even more significant would be the United States ending its funding of groups in Venezuela determined to subvert and/or overthrow Chávez.

You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught

I’ve been playing around with a new book for awhile. I don’t know if I’ll find the time to actually complete it, but if I do it’ll be called something like “Myths of U.S. foreign policy: How Americans keep getting fooled into support”. The leading myth of all, the one which entraps more Americans than any other, is the belief that the United States, in its foreign policy, means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are honorable, if not divinely inspired. Of that most Americans are certain. And as long as a person clings to that belief, it’s rather unlikely that s/he will become seriously doubtful and critical of the official stories.

It takes a lot of repetition while an American is growing up to inculcate this message into their young consciousness, and lots more repetition later on. Think of some of the lines from the song about racism from the Broadway classic show, “South Pacific” – “You’ve got to be taught” …

You’ve got to be taught
from year to year.
It’s got to be drummed
in your dear little ear.
You’ve got to be taught
before it’s too late.
Before you are 6 or 7 or 8.
To hate all the people
your relatives hate.
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

The education of an American true-believer is ongoing, continuous. All forms of media, all the time. Here is Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military officer in the United States, writing in the Washington Post recently:

We in the U.S. military are likewise held to a high standard. Like the early Romans, we are expected to do the right thing, and when we don’t, to make it right again. We have learned, after seven years of war, that trust is the coin of the realm – that building it takes time, losing it takes mere seconds, and maintaining it may be our most important and most difficult objective. That’s why images of prisoner maltreatment at Abu Ghraib still serve as recruiting tools for al-Qaeda. And it’s why each civilian casualty for which we are even remotely responsible sets back our efforts to gain the confidence of the Afghan people months, if not years. It doesn’t matter how hard we try to avoid hurting the innocent, and we do try very hard. It doesn’t matter how proportional the force we deploy, how precisely we strike. It doesn’t even matter if the enemy hides behind civilians. What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it. In the end, all that matters is that, despite our best efforts, sometimes we take the very lives we are trying to protect. … Lose the people’s trust, and we lose the war. … I see this sort of trust being fostered by our troops all over the world. They are building schools, roads, wells, hospitals and power stations. They work every day to build the sort of infrastructure that enables local governments to stand on their own. But mostly, even when they are going after the enemy, they are building friendships. They are building trust. And they are doing it in superb fashion.¹⁶

How many young servicemembers have heard such a talk from Mullen or other officers? How many of them have not been impressed, even choked up? How many Americans reading or hearing such stirring words have not had a lifetime of reinforcement reinforced once again? How many could even imagine that Admiral Mullen is spouting a bunch of crap? The great majority of Americans will swallow it. When Mullen declares: “What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it”, he’s implying that there was no way to avoid it. But of course it could have been easily avoided by not dropping bombs on the Afghan people.

You tell the true-believers that the truth is virtually the exact opposite of what Mullen has said and they look at you like you just got off the Number 36 bus from Mars. Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights in a row. His military and political policies destroyed one of the most progressive countries in Europe. And he called it “humanitarian intervention”. It’s still regarded by almost all Americans, including many, if not most, “progressives”, as just that.

Now why is that? Are all these people just ignorant? I think a better answer is that they have certain preconceptions; consciously or unconsciously, they have certain basic beliefs about the United States and its foreign policy, most prominent amongst which is the belief that the US means well. And if you don’t deal with this basic belief you’ll be talking to a stone wall.

1. Associated Press, August 1, 2007.

2. Press conference, February 25, 2009, transcript by Federal News Service.

3. Agence France Presse (AFP), January 20, 2009.

4. New York Times, December 29, 1998.

5. Associated Press, November 17, 2008.

6. See William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 10 (“Supporting Pol Pot”).

7. See William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 20 (“Cambodia, 1955-1973″).

8. Tinyurl

9. Reuters news agency, January 30, 2009.

10. The War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441).

11. Haaretz, leading Israeli newspaper, January 30, 2009.

12. Washington Post, February 14, 2009, column by Edward Schumacher-Matos.

13. New York Times, February 13, 2009.

14. Washington Post, February 12, 2009.

15. Washington Post, February 8, 2009.

16. Washington Post, February 15, 2009, p. B7.

Reprinted from Dessident Voice.

That the king can do no wrong is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution. -Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765

No living Homo sapiens is above the law. -(Notwithstanding our good friends and legal ancestors across the water, this is a fact that requires no citation.)

With respect to the position I take about the crimes of George Bush, I want to state at the outset that my motivation is not political. Although I’ve been a longtime Democrat (primarily because, unless there is some very compelling reason to be otherwise, I am always for “the little guy”), my political orientation is not rigid. For instance, I supported John McCain’s run for the presidency in 2000. More to the point, whether I’m giving a final summation to the jury or writing one of my true crime books, credibility has always meant everything to me. Therefore, my only master and my only mistress are the facts and objectivity. I have no others. This is why I can give you, the reader, a 100 percent guarantee that if a Democratic president had done what Bush did, I would be writing the same, identical piece you are about to read.

Perhaps the most amazing thing to me about the belief of many that George Bush lied to the American public in starting his war with Iraq is that the liberal columnists who have accused him of doing this merely make this point, and then go on to the next paragraph in their columns. Only very infrequently does a columnist add that because of it Bush should be impeached. If the charges are true, of course Bush should have been impeached, convicted, and removed from office. That’s almost too self-evident to state. But he deserves much more than impeachment. I mean, in America, we apparently impeach presidents for having consensual sex outside of marriage and trying to cover it up. If we impeach presidents for that, then if the president takes the country to war on a lie where thousands of American soldiers die horrible, violent deaths and over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, even babies are killed, the punishment obviously has to be much, much more severe. That’s just common sense. If Bush were impeached, convicted in the Senate, and removed from office, he’d still be a free man, still be able to wake up in the morning with his cup of coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice and read the morning paper, still travel widely and lead a life of privilege, still belong to his country club and get standing ovations whenever he chose to speak to the Republican faithful. This, for being responsible for over 100,000 horrible deaths?* For anyone interested in true justice, impeachment alone would be a joke for what Bush did.

Let’s look at the way some of the leading liberal lights (and, of course, the rest of the entire nation with the exception of those few recommending impeachment) have treated the issue of punishment for Bush’s cardinal sins. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote about “the false selling of the Iraq War. We were railroaded into an unnecessary war.” Fine, I agree. Now what? Krugman just goes on to the next paragraph. But if Bush falsely railroaded the nation into a war where over 100,000 people died, including 4,000 American soldiers, how can you go on to the next paragraph as if you had been writing that Bush spent the weekend at Camp David with his wife? For doing what Krugman believes Bush did, doesn’t Bush have to be punished commensurately in some way? Are there no consequences for committing a crime of colossal proportions?

Al Franken on the David Letterman show said, “Bush lied to us to take us to war” and quickly went on to another subject, as if he was saying “Bush lied to us in his budget.”

Senator Edward Kennedy, condemning Bush, said that “Bush’s distortions misled Congress in its war vote” and “No President of the United States should employ distortion of truth to take the nation to war.” But, Senator Kennedy, if a president does this, as you believe Bush did, then what? Remember, Clinton was impeached for allegedly trying to cover up a consensual sexual affair. What do you recommend for Bush for being responsible for more than 100,000 deaths? Nothing? He shouldn’t be held accountable for his actions? If one were to listen to you talk, that is the only conclusion one could come to. But why, Senator Kennedy, do you, like everyone else, want to give Bush this complete free ride?

The New York Times, in a June 17, 2004, editorial, said that in selling this nation on the war in Iraq, “the Bush administration convinced a substantial majority of Americans before the war that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to 9/ 11, . . . inexcusably selling the false Iraq-Al Qaeda claim to Americans.” But gentlemen, if this is so, then what? The New York Times didn’t say, just going on, like everyone else, to the next paragraph, talking about something else.

In a November 15, 2005, editorial, the New York Times said that “the president and his top advisers . . . did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It’s obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein’s weapons and his terrorist connections.” But if it’s “obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans” in taking them to a war that tens of thousands of people have paid for with their lives, now what? No punishment? If not, under what theory? Again, you’re just going to go on to the next paragraph?

I’m not going to go on to the next unrelated paragraph.

In early December of 2005, a New York Times-CBS nationwide poll showed that the majority of Americans believed Bush “intentionally misled” the nation to promote a war in Iraq. A December 11, 2005, article in the Los Angeles Times, after citing this national poll, went on to say that because so many Americans believed this, it might be difficult for Bush to get the continuing support of Americans for the war. In other words, the fact that most Americans believed Bush had deliberately misled them into war was of no consequence in and of itself. Its only consequence was that it might hurt his efforts to get support for the war thereafter. So the article was reporting on the effect of the poll findings as if it was reporting on the popularity, or lack thereof, of Bush’s position on global warming or immigration. Didn’t the author of the article know that Bush taking the nation to war on a lie (if such be the case) is the equivalent of saying he is responsible for well over 100,000 deaths? One would never know this by reading the article.

If Bush, in fact, intentionally misled this nation into war, what is the proper punishment for him? Since many Americans routinely want criminal defendants to be executed for murdering only one person, if we weren’t speaking of the president of the United States as the defendant here, to discuss anything less than the death penalty for someone responsible for over 100,000 deaths would on its face seem ludicrous.** But we are dealing with the president of the United States here.

On the other hand, the intensity of rage against Bush in America has been such (it never came remotely this close with Clinton because, at bottom, there was nothing of any real substance to have any serious rage against him for) that if I heard it once I heard it ten times that “someone should put a bullet in his head.” That, fortunately, is just loose talk, and even more fortunately not the way we do things in America. In any event, if an American jury were to find Bush guilty of first degree murder, it would be up to them to decide what the appropriate punishment should be, one of their options being the imposition of the death penalty.

Although I have never heard before what I am suggesting — that Bush be prosecuted for murder in an American courtroom — many have argued that “Bush should be prosecuted for war crimes” (mostly for the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. But for all intents and purposes this cannot be done.

*Even assuming, at this point, that Bush is criminally responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 people in the Iraq war, under federal law he could only be prosecuted for the deaths of the 4,000 American soldiers killed in the war. No American court would have jurisdiction to prosecute him for the one hundred and some thousand Iraqi deaths since these victims not only were not Americans, but they were killed in a foreign nation, Iraq. Despite their nationality, if they had been killed here in the States, there would of course be jurisdiction.

**Indeed, Bush himself, ironically, would be the last person who would quarrel with the proposition that being guilty of mass murder (even one murder, by his lights) calls for the death penalty as opposed to life imprisonment. As governor of Texas, Bush had the highest execution rate of any governor in American history: He was a very strong proponent of the death penalty who even laughingly mocked a condemned young woman who begged him to spare her life (“Please don’t kill me,” Bush mimicked her in a magazine interview with journalist Tucker Carlson), and even refused to commute the sentence of death down to life imprisonment for a young man who was mentally retarded (although as president he set aside the entire prison sentence of his friend Lewis “Scooter” Libby), and had a broad smile on his face when he announced in his second presidential debate with Al Gore that his state, Texas, was about to execute three convicted murderers.

In Bush’s two terms as Texas governor, he signed death warrants for an incredible 152 out of 153 executions against convicted murderers, the majority of whom only killed one single person. The only death sentence Bush commuted was for one of the many murders that mass murderer Henry Lucas had been convicted of. Bush was informed that Lucas had falsely confessed to this particular murder and was innocent, his conviction being improper. So in 152 out of 152 cases, Bush refused to show mercy even once, finding that not one of the 152 convicted killers should receive life imprisonment instead of the death penalty. Bush’s perfect 100 percent execution rate is highly uncommon even for the most conservative law-and-order governors.

The above is an excerpt from the book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder by Vincent Bugliosi Published by Vanguard Press; May 2008;$26.95US/$28.95CAN; 978-159315-481-3
Copyright © 2008 Vincent Bugliosi

Vincent Bugliosi received his law degree in 1964. In his career at the L.A. County District Attorney’s office, he successfully prosecuted 105 out of 106 felony jury trials, including 21 murder convictions without a single loss. His most famous trial, the Charles Manson case, became the basis of his classic, Helter Skelter, the biggest selling true-crime book in publishing history.

(New York, April 8, 2008) – The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) transferred at least 14 terrorist suspects to Jordanian custody for interrogation and torture since the September 11, 2001 attacks, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.  

The 36-page report, “Double Jeopardy: CIA Renditions to Jordan,” documents how Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID) served as a proxy jailer and interrogator for the CIA from 2001 until at least 2004. While a handful of countries received persons rendered by the United States during this period, no other country is believed to have held as many as Jordan.  
 
“The Bush administration claims that it has not transferred people to foreign custody for abusive interrogation,” said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. “But we’ve documented more than a dozen cases in which prisoners were sent to Jordan for torture.”  
 
Based largely on firsthand information from Jordanian former prisoners who were detained with the non-Jordanian terrorism suspects, the report describes eight previously unknown cases of rendition. The new cases include Ibrahim “Abu Mu’ath” al-Jeddawi, whose statements may have been relied upon as evidence in US status review proceedings at Guantanamo Bay, and Khayr al-Din al-Jaza’eri, whose alleged activities were mentioned in a high-profile terrorism prosecution in France. None are known to have been charged with a criminal offense.  
 
The report also excerpts a handwritten note from one of the rendered prisoners, Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, which he wrote while in Jordanian custody in late 2002. The note, which al-Sharqawi marked with his thumbprint, says that GID interrogators beat him “in a way that does not know any limits.”  
 
The note continues: “They threatened me with electricity, with snakes and dogs …. [They said] we’ll make you see death …. They threatened to rape me.”  
 
The GID appears to have systematically used torture and cruel or inhuman treatment against the detainees rendered by the CIA to Jordan. A common torture method was falaqa, by which prisoners are given extended beatings on the bottoms of their feet.  
 
“Just about everyone at GID was beaten with sticks,” a Jordanian former prisoner told Human Rights Watch. “People were beaten on their feet. They did it in the basement.”  
 
In a meeting with Human Rights Watch in Amman in late August 2007, senior GID officials denied that the GID had held prisoners rendered by the United States. They also denied that torture was practiced in GID detention. However, given the weight of credible evidence showing otherwise, their denials are unconvincing, Human Rights Watch said.  
 
The exact number of people that the United States has subjected to rendition abroad is not known. CIA Director Michael Hayden suggested in a September 7, 2007 speech before the Council on Foreign Relations that far fewer than 100 people – “mid-range two figures” – had been rendered abroad since the September 11, 2001 attacks.  
 
Human Rights Watch believes that the prisoners rendered to Jordan included at least five Yemenis, three Algerians, two Saudis, a Mauritanian, a Syrian, a Tunisian, and one or more Chechens from Russia. They may also have included a Libyan, an Iraqi Kurd, a Kuwaiti, one or more Egyptians, and a national of the United Arab Emirates.  
 
These prisoners include five men currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Hassan bin Attash, Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, Jamal Mar’i, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi – as well as one man now believed to be in custody in Saudi Arabia: Ibrahim “Abu Mu’ath” al-Jeddawi. Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, currently in custody in Libya, may also have been held in Jordan for a time.  
 
The current whereabouts of several other former prisoners are unknown or unconfirmed, though some of them were likely returned to their countries of origin, which include Syria, Algeria, and Iraq.  
 
Human Rights Watch called upon the US government to repudiate the use of rendition to torture as a counterterrorism tactic and permanently discontinue the CIA’s rendition program. It said that Jordan should open an immediate judicial inquiry into the GID’s use of torture, ill-treatment, and arbitrary detention.  
 
“Outsourcing torture is not only wrong, it’s illegal,” Mariner said. “And the US can’t say it doesn’t torture if it sends people to countries that do.”

Reprinted from Human Rights Watch.

Click here to view the embedded video.

By Howard Zinn

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

However the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the “Good War,” even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American “Empire.”

I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called “The Age of Imperialism.” It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire — or period — of “imperialism.”

I recall the classroom map (labeled “Western Expansion”) which presented the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge acquisition of land called “The Louisiana Purchase” hinted at nothing but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from their homes — what we now call “ethnic cleansing” — so that whites could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging “civilization” and its brutal discontents.

Neither the discussions of “Jacksonian democracy” in history courses, nor the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me about the “Trail of Tears,” the deadly forced march of “the five civilized tribes” westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as “emancipation” was proclaimed for black people by Lincoln’s administration.

That classroom map also had a section to the south and west labeled “Mexican Cession.” This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war against Mexico in 1846 in which the United States seized half of that country’s land, giving us California and the great Southwest. The term “Manifest Destiny,” used at that time, soon of course became more universal. On the eve of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Washington Post saw beyond Cuba: “We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle.”

The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba, appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S. interest. After all, hadn’t the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be under our protection? But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the invasion of the Philippines, halfway around the world. The word “imperialism” now seemed a fitting one for U.S. actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war — treated quickly and superficially in the history books — gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But this was not something I learned in university either.

The “Sole Superpower” Comes into View

Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of history into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive foreign policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now appeared as a succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the Panama Canal zone from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican coast, the dispatch of the Marines to almost every country in Central America, occupying armies sent to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As the much-decorated General Smedley Butler, who participated in many of those interventions, wrote later: “I was an errand boy for Wall Street.”

At the very time I was learning this history — the years after World War II — the United States was becoming not just another imperial power, but the world’s leading superpower. Determined to maintain and expand its monopoly on nuclear weapons, it was taking over remote islands in the Pacific, forcing the inhabitants to leave, and turning the islands into deadly playgrounds for more atomic tests.

In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored radiation in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing teams went home: “[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and its sad-eyed patient exiles.” The tests in the Pacific were followed, over the years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, more than a thousand tests in all.

When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a graduate student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me to understand American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F. Stone’s Weekly. Stone was among the very few journalists who questioned the official justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me then that it was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that prompted U.S. intervention, but the desire of the United States to have a firm foothold on the continent of Asia, especially now that the Communists were in power in China.

Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the United States became yet clearer to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the movement against the war.

When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the National Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country’s motives as a quest for “tin, rubber, oil.”

Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the century, nor the strong opposition to World War I — indeed no antiwar movement in the history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that more than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was part of a grander imperial design.

Various interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower — even after the fall of its powerful rival, the Soviet Union — to establish its dominance everywhere. Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing assault on Panama in 1989, the first Gulf war of 1991. Was George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam Hussein’s seizure of Kuwait, or was he using that event as an opportunity to move U.S. power firmly into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given the history of the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern oil dating from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and the CIA’s overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in Iran in 1953, it is not hard to decide that question.

Justifying Empire

The ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson’s book The Sorrows of Empire, the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United States.

Since that date, with the initiation of a “war on terrorism,” many more bases have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the desert of Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.

When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew — what we had in common was that we both read books — that he considered this “an imperialist war.” Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.

In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism.

The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of “The American Century.” The time had arrived, he said, for the United States “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit.”

We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design. It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the Bush administration, but with assurances that the motive of this “influence” is benign, that the “purposes” — whether in Luce’s formulation or more recent ones — are noble, that this is an “imperialism lite.” As George Bush said in his second inaugural address: “Spreading liberty around the world… is the calling of our time.” The New York Times called that speech “striking for its idealism.”

The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project — Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used “her navy and her army… as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression.” And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: “The values you learned here… will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world.”

For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes — in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta.

Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense — that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization — begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?

Howard Zinn is the author of A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States, now being filmed for a major television documentary. His newest book is A People’s History of American Empire, the story of America in the world, told in comics form, with Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle in the American Empire Project book series.

Olbermann: Pres. Bush demands a law which would clear phone giants from responsibility for government’s unjustified spying on Americans

SPECIAL COMMENT

By Keith Olbermann

Anchor, ‘Countdown’

updated 6:06 p.m. ET Feb. 1, 2008

In a Presidency of hypocrisy; an Administration of exploitation; a labyrinth of leadership, in which every vital fact is a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma hidden under a claim of executive privilege supervised by an idiot, this one, is surprisingly easy.

President Bush has put protecting the Telecom giants from the laws ahead of protecting you from the terrorists.

He has demanded an extension of the FYCA law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but only an extension that includes retroactive immunity for the Telecoms who helped him spy on you.

Congress has given him, and he has signed, a 15-day extension, which simply kicks the time bomb down the field, and has changed nothing of his insipid rhetoric, in which he portrays the Democrats as ‘soft on terror’ and getting in the way of his Superhuman efforts to protect the nation when, in fact and with bitter irony, if anybody is ‘soft on terror’ here it is Mr. Bush.

In the State of the Union Address, Sir, you told Congress, “if you do not act by Friday, our ability to track terrorist threats would be weakened and our citizens will be in greater danger.”

Yet you are willing to weaken that ability!

You will subject us, your citizens, to that greater danger.

This, Mr. Bush, is simple enough even for you to understand: If Congress approves a new FYCA act without telecom immunity and sends it to your desk and you veto it, you, by your own terms and your own definitions, you  will have just sided with the terrorists.

You got to have this law, or we’re all going to die. But you might veto this law!

It’s bad enough, Sir, that you are demanding an ex post facto law which would clear the phone giants from responsibility for their systematic, aggressive, and blatant collaboration with your illegal and unjustified spying on Americans, under the flimsy guise of looking for any terrorists stupid enough to make a collect call or send a mass e-mail.

But when you then demanded again, during the State of the Union address, that Congress retroactively clear the Verizons and the AT&T’s, you wouldn’t even confirm that they actually did anything for which they deserved to be cleared!

“The Congress must pass liability protection for companies believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend America.”

Believed?

Don’t you know?

Does the endless hair-splitting of your presidential fine print, extend even here?

If you, Sir, are asking Congress, and us, to join you in this shameless, breathless, literal, textbook example of fascism; the merged efforts of government and corporations who answer to no government, you still don’t have the guts to even say the telecom companies did assist you, in your efforts?

Will you and the equivocators who surround you like a cocoon never go on the record about anything?

Even the stuff you claim to believe in?

Silly me.

Of course Mr. Bush is going to say “believed.”

Yes, it sounds dumber than if he had referred to himself as “the alleged president,” or had said today was “reportedly Thursday,” or had claimed “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.

But the moment he says anything else, any doubt that the telecoms knowingly broke the law, is out the window, and with it, any chance that even the Republicans who are fighting this like they were trying to fend off terrorists using nothing but broken beer bottles and swear words couldn’t consent to retroactively immunize corporate criminals.

Which is why the Vice President probably shouldn’t have phoned in to the Rush Limbaugh Propaganda-Festival yesterday.

Sixth sentence out of Mr. Cheney’s mouth.

The FYCA bill is about, quote, “retroactive liability protection for the companies that have worked with us and helped us prevent further attacks against the United States.”

Oops.

Mr. Cheney is something of a loose cannon, of course.

But he kind of let the wrong cat out of the bag there.

Because Mr. Bush and the corporations he values more than people didn’t want anybody to verify what Mark Klein says.

Mark Klein is the AT&T Whistleblower who appeared on this newscast last November… who explained, in the placid, dull terms of your local neighborhood IT desk, how he personally attached all of AT&T’s circuits, everything carrying every phone call, every e-mail, every bit of web browsing into a secure room – Room Number 641-A, at the Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, where it was all copied so the government could look at it.

Not some of it; not just the international part of it; certainly not just the stuff some truly patriotic and telepathic spy might be able to divine had been sent or spoken by or to a terrorist.

Everything.

Every time you looked at a naked picture, every time you bid on eBay, every time you phoned-in a donation to a Democrat.

“My thought was ‘George Orwell’s 1984,’” Mr. Klein told me, reflecting back, “and here I am, being forced to connect the Big Brother machine.”

You know, Mr. Bush, if Mr. Klein’s “Big Brother Machine”  the one the Vice President conveniently just confirmed for us if it was of any damn use at all at actually finding anything, you could probably program it to find out who started that slanderous e-mail about Barack Obama.

Use Room 641-A to identify that assassin, Sir, and I’ll stand up and applaud you.

Yeah, I’m holding my breath on that one, too.

But of course, Sir, this isn’t about finding that kind of needle in a haystack. This isn’t even about finding a haystack. This is about scooping up every piece of hay there ever was, and laying the groundwork for the next little job which you have to outsource to AT&T and Verizon.

It was your Director of National Intelligence, Mr. McConnell, letting this one out of the same bag.

The need for  Homeland Security to stave off cyber-attacks against the government’s computer networks.

And how do they do that, Sir?

By constantly monitoring the internet, the whole internet.

And who actually, physically, does that, Mr. Bush?

Right. The same Telecom giants for whom you want immunity, quickly. So quickly, you wouldn’t believe it.

Because this previous domestic spying, and this upcoming policing of the internet — they may be completely evil, indiscriminate, unlawful.

So you have to dress it up, as something just the opposite.

It isn’t evil it’s “to protect America.”

It isn’t indiscriminate it’s “the ability to monitor terrorist communications.”

It isn’t unlawful it’s just the kind of perfectly legal thing, for which you happen to need immunity!

There’s yet another level to this, and here we move from Big Brother to Sleazy Son.

Mr. Bush’s new Attorney General, Mr. Mukasey, the one who has already taken four different positions on water-boarding, and who may yet tie that record on this subject of telecom immunity, he has a very personal stake in this.

There happens to be a partner in the law firm of Bracewell and Giuliani, named Marc Mukasey. And Bracewell and Giuliani and the Attorney General’s son Marc, just happen to represent Verizon.

You know, Verizon – Telecom Giant.

And all of a sudden this is no longer just a farce in which “protecting the Telecoms” is dressed up for us as, “protecting us from terrorist conference calls.”

Now it begins to look like the bureaucrats of the Third Reich trying to protect the Krupp Family industrial giants by literally re-writing the laws for their benefit.

And we know how that turned out: Alfried Krupp and eleven of his directors were convicted of War Crimes at Nuremburg.

Nevertheless.

For those of us watching a President demanding this very specific law (the one the Germans had was called the  “Lex Krupp”) there is one surprising bit of comfort in all this:

Clearly, Mr. Bush is at his hyperbolic worst here.

Consider how his former chief of staff Andy Card came on and scolded Chris Matthews and me after the State of the Union address.

“The President’s address tonight was very important,” Card said, “because it really was a sobering call to reality for us.

“And the reality is, we have an enemy who wants to hurt us. The primary job of the president to protect us.

“He talked about protecting us. He talked about the needs to have the tools  to protect us.”

Indeed, Mr. Bush.

The primary job of any president is to protect us.

Not just those of us who own Internet and Telephone companies all of us.

And even you, Sir, with your intermittent grasp of reality, even with your ego greater than a 100-percent approval rating… even with your messianic petulance, even you could not truly choose to protect the corporations instead of the people.

I am not talking about ethics here.

I am talking about blame.

Even if it’s you throwing out the baby with the bathwater, Mr. Bush, it still means we can safely conclude, there is no baby!

This is not a choice of protecting the telecoms from prosecution, or protecting the people from terrorists, Sir.

It is a choice of protecting the telecoms from prosecution, or pretending to protect the people from terrorists.

Sorry, Mr. Bush. The eavesdropping provisions of FYCA have obviously had no impact on counter-terrorism, and there is no current or perceived terrorist threat, the thwarting of which could hinge on an e-mail or a phone call going through room 641-A at AT&T in San Francisco next week or next month.

Because if there were, Mr. Bush, and you were to, by your own hand, veto an extension of this eavesdropping, and some terrorist attack were to follow, you would not merely be guilty of siding with the terrorists, you would not merely be guilty of prioritizing the telecoms over the people, you would not merely be guilty of stupidity, you would not merely be guilty of treason but you would be personally, and eternally, responsible.

And if there is one thing we know about you Mr. Bush, one thing that you have proved time and time again under any and all circumstances, it is that you are never responsible.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose “Duelfer Report” established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq’s nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

 To read the entire article go here.